theory

On July 1, 2017, ESC: English Studies in Canada will be moving from its long-time home at the University of Alberta to its new residence at Western University. To mark this occasion, and as a parting editorial gesture, the Co-Editors will publish a special issue on the theme of “transitions.” The theme avails itself of multiple disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, cultural, political, historical, and other contextual investments. In recognizing that broad applicability, our capacious understanding of the term is designed to invite widespread and diverse interest.

The Postgraduate English Journal, Durham University’s online peer-reviewed literary journal, has been publishing postgraduate research biannually since the year 2000 and is one of the longest-running online postgraduate literary journals in the UK. In recent years the journal has received reprint requests from academic publishers.

Early-career researchers/academics and postgraduates are invited to submit papers of 5 – 7,000 words (or book reviews of no more than 2000 words) by 30 September 2016 for publication in the journal’s 33rd edition this Autumn.

Early Modern Debts: Obligation and Cancellation in European Culture, 1550-1700

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 21-22 September 2017

[More details can be found here: early-modern-debts.space]

Historians, philosophers, economists, scholars of art, literature and theatre have begun to attend more closely to the role of debt in early modern culture. It has become clear that private debt, nebulously conceived as credit, was involved in the production and reproduction of social relations, political ideology, even subjectivity. The history of debt has become an object of serious interdisciplinary interest, but the question of how apparently distinct forms of debt co-developed is often suspended.

Contemporary environmental criticism has embraced the ecological as an occasion for thinking interconnectedness at ever-increasing spatial and temporal scales. This trend in ecological thinking has been aided by justifiably popular concepts such as planetary action, geological time, and of course, the Anthropocene. Without denying the urgency of planetary thinking, we propose to investigate ecology in “the particular.”

From April 5-7, 2017, the interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Humanities CLUE+ at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam organises a three-day international conference on resonances of the work of the critical theorist and philosopher Judith Butler.

Critical Theory in the Humanities: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler